The present research aims to identify Japanese listeners’ perception patterns of non-native liquid contrasts. The study examines Japanese listeners’ perception of Arabic liquids (/l/, /r/, /ll/ and /rr/). Japanese listeners showed poor performance on the Arabic /l/-/r/ discrimination and very good performance on the discrimination of the other liquid contrasts (/l/-ll/, /ll/-/rr/, /l/-/rr/, /r/...

We investigate Arabic Context Free Grammar parsing with dependency annotation comparing lexicalised and unlexicalised parsers. We study how morphosyntactic as well as function tag information percolation in the form of grammar transforms (Johnson, 1998, Kulick et al., 2006) affects the performance of a parser and helps dependency assignment. We focus on the three most frequent functional tags i...

Part-of-Speech (POS) tagging is a key step in many NLP algorithms. However, tweets are difficult to POS tag because they are short, are not always written maintaining formal grammar and proper spelling, and abbreviations are often used to overcome their restricted lengths. Arabic tweets also show a further range of linguistic phenomena such as usage of different dialects, romanised Arabic and b...

The Arabic-Urdu-Farsi family of languages is used by over 300 million people. Unlike letters of the Roman alphabet, each Arabic character can assume different shapes which leads to a more compact representation of linguistic information, but which also causes increased difficulties in printing. In previous work IHyder, 1971], a grammatical model was developed which determines the appropriate sh...

Finite-state morphology has been successful in the description and computational implementation of a wide variety of natural languages. However, the particular challenges of Arabic, and the limitations of some implementations of finite-state morphology, have led many researchers to believe that finite-state power was not sufficient to handle Arabic and other Semitic morphology. This paper illus...

The model of categorial grammars is a sufficiently flexible model to give an account of several languages and several forms of organisation of the linguistic units of these languages (coordination, subordination, etc). However, the research tasks were limited almost exclusively to European languages. A language like Arabic, in spite of the richness of the tradition of its schools of thought, wh...

This work is a ‘prospective extension’ of the lexical work achieved in the DIINAR-MBC Euro-Mediterranean project. It aims at contributing to the crucial issue in the field of Arabic NLP of the operations involved in lemmatization, which are necessarily based on a definition of the Arabic entries of a monolingual or multilingual lexical database. As shown in previous work, lexical entries can be...